Charles Gordone

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Charles Edward Gordone
Born October 12, 1925(1925-10-12)
Cleveland, Ohio
Died November 16, 1995 (aged 70)
College Station, Texas
Occupation Actor, director, playwright, producer, educator
Nationality American

Charles Edward Gordone (12 October 1925 - 16 November 1995) was a playwright, actor, director, and educator. The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Gordone devoted much of his professional life to the pursuit of multi-racial American theater and racial unity.

With a racial heritage of black, Native American, and white, Gordone said of himself that he descended from "three races and five nationalities. Just call me a North American mestizo." He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Charles Fleming and Camille Morgan Fleming. Gordone grew up in Elkhart, Indiana with his brothers Jack and Stanley and his sister Shirley. Camille Fleming remarried William L. Gordon and later had Gordone's sister Leah Geraldine.

Gordone attended UCLA, Los Angeles City College, California State University in Los Angeles and later, New York University and Columbia University. After a tour in the U.S. Air Force, Gordone moved to New York City where he worked waiting tables and acting. After performing in numerous on and off Broadway shows, Gordone won an Obie Award in 1953 for his role in an all-black production of Of Mice and Men.

Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, Gordone continued acting, started directing and co-founded both the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers and the Vantage Theater in Queens. Her performed in Jean Genet's The Blacks, 1961–1966, along with James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, and many other Black actors who went on to change Hollywood. He said that acting as the valet in the play changed his life, and that this was when he began to write No Place to Be Somebody.

It was during his employment as a bartender in Greenwich Village that Gordone found inspiration for his first play No Place To Be Somebody which won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize (a first for both an African American playwright and an off-Broadway play). Written over 7 years, the play explored racial tensions in a Civil Rights-era story about a black bartender who tries to outsmart a white mobster syndicate. In his final speech, in June 1995, delivered at the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Gordone described the play as being "about country folk who had migrated to the big city, seeking the urban myth of success, only to find disappointment, despair, and death." The play had three national touring companies from 1970 to 1977, which he directed. From 1978 to 1980, Gordone returned to his native Midwest and worked in the theater and college community of St. Louis. He also began work on a stage Western.

In 1981, Gordone moved back to California, where he met his future wife Susan Kouyomjian in Berkeley. After working together for three years at her multiracial theater, American Stage, Gordone returned to New York City to resume work on his stage Western entitled Roan Brown & Cherry. Soon after, Susan joined him in Harlem. After relocating to Taos, New Mexico, in 1987 for a fellowship at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch (where they lived in the cabin once occupied by D. H. Lawrence), Susan and Charles married and began their tenure at Texas A&M University. They moved to College Station, Texas to teach English and theater and to advance inclusion at the campus that had been segregated for one hundred years. From 1990 to 1995, the Gordones joined the multi-racial Western Revival.

Gordone died of liver cancer on November 16, 1995. The cowboy poets and musicians of the Texas Panhandle honored him with a prairie funeral at sunset and scattered his ashes across the legendary XIT Ranch. In 1996, the NEA profiled at length the Gordones' work for integration at Texas A&M University, for "strengthening the diverse bonds of our cultural heritage."

The Texas A&M Creative Writing Program has established The Charles Gordone Awards to commemorate Gordone by offering cash prizes each spring in poetry and in prose to an undergraduate and graduate student.

Efforts continue to establish a permanent memorial on the Texas A&M University campus.

[edit] Awards

  • (1953) Obie Award, Best Actor in Of Mice and Men
  • (1970) Pulitzer Prize for Drama, No Place to Be Somebody
  • (1970) Los Angeles Critics Circle Award
  • (1970) Drama Desk Award for No Place to Be Somebody
  • (1970) Vernon Rice Award
  • (1971) National Institute of Arts and Letters award

[edit] Bibliography

  • (1967) No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy
  • (1970) Chumpanzee
  • (1970) Willy Bignigga
  • (1970) Gordone Is a Muthah
  • (1975) Baba-Chops
  • (1977) The Last Chord
  • (1978) A Qualification for Anabiosis

[edit] References

  1. National Endowment for the Arts, The Changing Faces of Tradition, "A Revival Meeting and Its Missionaries: The Cowboy Poetry Gathering", Buck Ramsey, October 1996. (Reprinted in Contemporary Authors, vol. 180.)
  2. Peacock, Scott, ed., Gordone, Charles 1925-1995. Contemporary Authors, vol. 180 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Group, 2000) 166-176.
  3. Honoring A Life's Work Realized, The Eagle (October 11, 2004)
  4. Austin American Statesman, October 11, 2004, "A Tribute to Life Without Labels", Ralph Haurwitz.
  5. Capturing A Legacy - Pulitzer Prize Winning Former Professor Memorialized Today, The Battalion (October 12, 2004)
  6. Dallas Morning News, Texas Living Section, "Requiem for a Maverick", Bryan Woolley, November 14, 2004.
  7. 'Into the West', The Battalion, July 20, 2006, Matthew Watkins.
  8. The Eagle, July 20, 2006, "A Man of Vision--New Museum Honors Pulitzer Prize Winning Lecturer Gordone"
  9. 'Just call me a North American mestizo.', The Battalion (February 22, 2008)
  10. Charles Gordone, Multi-talented on the Stage!, African American Registry
  11. The Short Happy Afterlife of Charles Gordone, The Touchstone (Feb/March 1996)
  12. E-Notes Charles Gordone Literary Criticism